LITHOGRAPHY. 200 YEARS OF ART, HISTORY & TECHNIQUE

You might expect from the theme of this book that you would be subjected to a lot of examples of black and white book illustrations with some bland tinted Currier and Ives or suchlike mixed in. Such is not the case. We learn in these pages that many famous artists, starting with Goya just before 1800, preferred lithography as the medium for certain of their works. This was partly because lithographic technique allowed artists to produce for sale many copies of a work of art, all "original" in the sense that all prints were duplicates of the original drawn on the lithographic stone, and the fidelity of each print was overseen by the artist in cooperation with the printer. But a perhaps more important reason for many artists was that they could achieve certain effects with the process that gave better expression of their artistic vision. This fact may be little known to those of us not heavily devoted to art. It was a revelation to me, as I had always(mistakenly, it seems) assumed that lithography was a sort of cut-rate art handy for making many reproductions, but not in the same league as painting. There are reproductions of works of lithographic art by many famous artists such as Goya, Delacroix, De Chirico, Picasso, Manet, and others to show differently. This was, actually, the main attraction of the book for me, the many, many reproductions spanning those 200 years since its invention. The text is more chronological and historical than expository. The different essays have many interesting bits of information, but tend to be a bit overloaded with names of people involved in the development and promotion of the technique. There was much more information about these obscure historical developments than I personally felt I needed to know. And you shouldn't look for much critiquing of the merits of the various works reproduced. But on the very positive side, this is a coffee-table sized book, with the reproductions printed on thick paper. There is something profoundly moving and universal about some of the lithographs depicting scenes of war or tragedy that seems to reduce large events down to very elemental human terms. Or, conversely, this art form can elevate the humanly simple into the realm of the universally symbolic. But I was impressed also with the delicate softness of some of the prints by impressionists like Renoir. This large sampling of the works of many artists, some unfamiliar, might inspire you, as it has me, to delve further and seek individual critical studies of some of them. Some of the used offers on Amazon for "Lithography: 200 years of Art, History and Technique" would be particularly good buys, considering all the reproductions you would receive in this volume.